I take it that a strong argument against your claim about Buddhism is that, before it came to the West, it successfully spread across all of South, East, and Southeast Asia and established itself as one of the major world religions; that doesn't seem to be the result of just a random sequence of completely independent misunderstandings.
Certainly the average lay Buddhist has an idea of Buddhism that's not necessarily in keeping with the traditions of the religion. But the average lay Christian is a heretic! That's just usual for religion. If Buddhism spread because of one big misinterpretation (rather than a sequence of independent misrepresentations), then that's just what the religion is now.
I also take it that we have parallels for extremely academic and difficult philosophies becoming extremely influential and religiously important, even among people who aren't educated enough to actually understand them. By Late Antiquity the 'official' form of paganism was Platonism!
I didn't think that Narco subs are this widely used, but maybe it's just that they are found a lot less than they are used off the coast of the Americas?
Peter Brook's 3 hour film adaptation of The Mahabharata is worth watching for capturing the weirdness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata_(1989_film)
I take it that a strong argument against your claim about Buddhism is that, before it came to the West, it successfully spread across all of South, East, and Southeast Asia and established itself as one of the major world religions; that doesn't seem to be the result of just a random sequence of completely independent misunderstandings.
Certainly the average lay Buddhist has an idea of Buddhism that's not necessarily in keeping with the traditions of the religion. But the average lay Christian is a heretic! That's just usual for religion. If Buddhism spread because of one big misinterpretation (rather than a sequence of independent misrepresentations), then that's just what the religion is now.
I also take it that we have parallels for extremely academic and difficult philosophies becoming extremely influential and religiously important, even among people who aren't educated enough to actually understand them. By Late Antiquity the 'official' form of paganism was Platonism!
A podcast queue of 3,000 is mad 😅 That's like 100 full days of listening. Surely they'll be out of date by the time you get to the end
I didn't think that Narco subs are this widely used, but maybe it's just that they are found a lot less than they are used off the coast of the Americas?